


The Dunce Macabre

by shellfishDimes



Category: John Dies at the End - David Wong
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-12
Updated: 2014-03-12
Packaged: 2018-01-15 11:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1303444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellfishDimes/pseuds/shellfishDimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Rule number one: if there's a huge goddamn bloodstain on the floor, don't stand around like an asshole and poke at it. Rule number two, if there isn't an open and <i>fast</i> fucking means of escape, you don't go in."</p><p>This was supposed to just be a fun, drunken afternoon of careless vandalism and setting shit nobody cared about on fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dunce Macabre

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the summer before the events of _This Book is Full of Spiders_.

"TOMBSTONE SHADOW, STRETCHIN' ACROSS MY PATH!  
TOMBSTONE SHADOW, STRETCHIN' ACROSS MY PATH!  
EV'RY TIME I GET SOME GOOD NEWS, OOH,  
THERE'S A SHADOW ON MY BACK!"

The volume knob on John's Caddie was non-existent, having probably gone to where any sensible person would have sent the Caddie – the junkyard. John was a man of few virtues, and sensibility definitely wasn't one of them, which was why he was still driving the Caddie. It was also why he had made the minimum amount of effort required to try and fix the car's sound system. He'd poked at all the buttons, stuck his finger into the hole where the volume knob should be, and diagnosed the situation as irreversible.

Dave had provided a roll of electrician's tape and he'd helped John tape some wadded up towels to the speakers on each end of the Caddie's dash. They had hoped that this would muffle the sound.

It did not.

"SAW THE GYPSY MAN, WAY DOWN IN SAN BERDOO!  
SAID, I SAW THE GYPSY MAN, WAY DOWN IN SAN BERDOO!"

The temperature was somewhere in the high nineties, making this one of the hottest summer days in recent Undisclosed history. The Caddie's windows were rolled down as they drove, and yet Dave's shirt was still stuck to his seat with sweat. It was like sitting in a wind tunnel in the Sahara desert. Or somewhere infinitely more humid, like maybe the Amazon. Dave wasn't that clear on the particulars of climate zones. The main point was, it was hot as fuck, he was sweating like a paedophile at a playground, and even though he was on his fourth or fifth beer of the afternoon, most of the alcohol had evaporated from his body through his pores.

"FIVE DOLLARS ON THE TABLE, OOH!  
KEEP ME 'WAY FROM MY TOMB!"

And John Fogerty just wouldn't let it go.

"Do you think it would stop if we bashed it in with an axe?" he asked John.

"You're not wrecking my new car," said John. He had one hand on the wheel and one hanging out the window. A cigarette was hanging out of his mouth. As dogs looked like their owners, so had Uncle Pat's Caddie been the perfect match for John.

"This car hasn't been new since the seventies," Dave said, taking another swig from his beer. He was determined to finish it before its temperature rose to the level of piss. The cooler in the back seat only had two beers left from the twelve pack that they'd bought. That _Dave_ had bought, actually, since John had spent his last remaining money on a Vietnam-era flamethrower he got off eBay. Due to a happy coincidence and an inefficient FedEx delivery guy, both the flamethrower and the hideously orange Caddie had come into John's possession on the same day. The direction to take was obvious: the liquor store, and then south almost to Undisclosed city limits, to the old abandoned hotel to test out the flamethrower.

"SINISTER PURPOSE! KNOCKIN' AT YOUR DOOR! COME AND TAKE MY HAND!" John Fogerty roared as the Caddie pulled to a stop in front of the dilapidated building. John killed the engine, and the silence that followed was so sudden and strange that Dave's ears were almost ringing with it.

John reached into the cooler in the back seat and took out the remaining two beers, handing one to Dave. He appeared to consider something, and then took his hat off, running a hand through his hair to make it stop lying flat, and probably to give it some ventilation. Dave could imagine microscopic droplets of sweat flying and hitting him in the face, but then he remembered that unlike him, John wasn't a sweat factory. Most of the time.

John's recent girlfriend had done an abysmal job when she'd tried to cut his hair. Her name was something like Carol or Cheryl, although probably spelled with extra vowels. She was training to be a hairdresser. Since he needed a haircut anyway, John had volunteered to model for her. She'd gone for it with limitless enthusiasm and no skill whatsoever. John's hair now resembled a sheep which had been sheared by a drunken farmer wearing boxing gloves. In a fog.

Dave was busy wondering how someone could give that kind of haircut and not be legally blind, when he noticed that John was already out of the car and looking at him expectantly through the driver's side window. He already had the two tanks of nitrogen and gasoline feeding the flamethrower strapped to his back. "Coming, Dave?" Dave unstuck himself from the car seat and got out, squinting in the sunshine. "You gonna take the Bible bat from the trunk?" asked John.

"Why? Is there something you're not telling me, John? If there's a monster or a ghost or whatever in there, now would be a good time to tell me." This wouldn't be the first time John had done this, taken Dave somewhere under false pretences. The last time this happened Dave had to get seven stitches on his knee because it'd been torn open when he slipped and fell while running, in a way that was neither brave nor dignified, from an acid-spitting rat-frog the size of Molly someone had 'accidentally' bred in their basement.

"There was that dead hobo, but I'm pretty sure the police took care of that," said John. "I thought I could throw things at you. You could hit them with the Bible bat so I could spit flame at them while they're flying through the air."

After five beers, this seemed like a fantastic idea to Dave. "I think we need a better name for the Bible bat," he commented. He grabbed the baseball bat from the Caddie's trunk, following John into the building.

There was no shortage of abandoned buildings scattered all over Undisclosed. You could explain this by saying that the property market was really feeling the recession. A more accurate explanation would be that Undisclosed was such a shithole that everyone who could haul ass out of it would seize the first chance they got. And so the family homes, the crack dens, the communes and the meth labs all alike got left behind and submitted to the unkind Midwest climate.

The hotel had been abandoned for as long as Dave could remember. Its owners had hoped that by building an upscale apartment building on the fringes of the city, they would attract the kind of clientele that would put Undisclosed on the map as something other than a place where you'd only stop if you really, really, _really_ needed a piss and all the other cities in a two-hundred mile radius had been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. They even went as far as laying down an entire new street for the hotel called Palm Road, which was in itself fucking ridiculous, since the nearest palm tree to Undisclosed was a thousand miles away. It didn't take long for the owners to go bankrupt, since none of the tenants could afford to stay for longer periods of time, or had even wanted to. The Palm Road apartments then had a brief stint as a retirement home. The home had died with its residents, and now it was just another symbol of failed real estate investment.

They went in, squeezing through a smashed glass door. Although the air was cooler in here, the smell made it almost not worth it. Mildew, piss, and dust. Graffiti and black mould decorated the walls, and broken tiles and pulled out, swollen boards littered the floor. Dave almost slipped on a crushed can of Four Loko, and then nearly twisted his ankle trying not to step on a used condom. It was that kind of place. Burning some stuff in it with John's flamethrower would probably be doing it a big favour.

"There's that old busted piano in the next room. If the junkies haven't taken it," said John.

"Why would they take it?"

"To… start a junkie band?"

"Maybe they could recruit the dead hobo and call it Zombie Mary Jane," said Dave.

John heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Sometimes I wish zombies were real."

"I don't," said Dave. John stepped over a box with old eighties exercise tapes which propped open the door to the next room. There were tall windows running down the length of one wall. Their tops hadn't been boarded up, so there was just enough natural light for Dave not to worry about stepping on something and breaking his neck.

The skeleton of an overturned piano was lying in the middle of the floor. All its strings were pulled out, the lid was missing and half the keys were smashed. John braced his feet against the floor, his sneakers digging into the dirt. He aimed the flamethrower at the piano, his finger on the trigger.

"Looks like your music career is _going up in flames!_ " John yelled, and rained liquid mayhem down on the unsuspecting instrument. The piano caught fire almost instantaneously, sending up a sudden column of flames almost up to the cracked, vaulted ceiling. Dave could feel the heat on his face even where he was standing. He watched John douse the piano in flames, his face jollier than a custom made Christmas card. Dave wasn't going to deny that it was a little creepy that his best friend seemed to enjoy casual pyromania so much, but on the other hand, this was a fucking _flamethrower_. You'd have to be dead on the inside not to enjoy that.

John took the finger off the trigger when the piano appeared to be sufficiently on fire. The flamethrower sputtered out. The heat in the room had gone up by about ten degrees, and Dave could feel himself starting to sweat again.

"We should have brought marshmallows," Dave said, watching the flames crackle.

"We should do that next time. We could have a really flaming party," said John. "Get it? Because there's fire, and also because you're a flaming homo."

"John."

"You could have a coming-out party! I've been reading about them on the internet for you, Dave. So that we can be prepared when you finally admit how much you love taking it in the ass."

"John, shut up."

"D'you know you can get dick moulding kits for thirty bucks? I know this guy, Mason, who can get me some for half price. I could make a replica of my dick out of solid chocolate and use it as a centrepiece at your party. Although I don't think there would be enough chocolate. We'd probably have to order in bulk—"

"John, shut up!" Dave yelled. "Didn't you hear that?"

"Hear what? All of North America struggling with a chocolate shortage?"

Dave counted to ten in his head, very quickly. "No, John. That noise just now, like something heavy falling down some stairs. Like a bag of flour, or—"

"A body?" John looked excited for almost a full second, and then switched to concerned. "Dave, do you think it's the hobo?"

"You mean the one you said wasn't here anymore?"

"He was frozen under three feet of ice last winter. Just his legs were sticking out. He had socks on, which was a bit weird." John was the kind of guy who would find socks on a corpse of a homeless man stranger than the fact that the corpse was half-submerged in ice, which said a lot about him as a person. "It was on national news. What were you doing?"

"I kind of stopped watching TV after I found out someone was using it to watch me," said Dave. He listened for more sounds that zombies would make if zombies were real, but he could hear nothing except the crackling of the burning piano. The room was quickly getting oppressively hot.

"Makes sense," agreed John. "Where did the sound come from?"

Dave pointed to the door next to the one they had come through. "Either the second floor stairs or the basement." Dave wasn't very familiar with the layout of the building since abandoned places creeped him out even on a hot and bright summer day like this one, but he knew the approximate location of those two staircases. They'd gone to the second floor once before, and then Dave and Amy had watched _The Shining_ over Skype together, and Dave had decided that in-depth exploration of abandoned hotels was for someone who was more immune to the antics of a pair of creepy as fuck ghost twins. In other words, someone other than Dave. He thought he had a pretty good tolerance level when it came to horror films, seeing as John and he went through far scarier shit on an almost daily basis, a perk of living in Undisclosed, but he drew the line at creepy kids.

"Where did they find the dead hobo?" Dave asked.

John pointed to the door next to the one they had come through. "The basement," he said.

Dave wondered why he'd even asked. He moved the bat from one sweaty hand to another, wiping his palms on his jeans. John had that look on his face again. "We have to go check it out!" he said.

"We're not on _Scooby-Doo,_ John," said Dave.

"If we were, you'd be Shaggy," said John, already stepping over the box with the exercise tapes and out of the room. "Me and Amy would be Daphne and Fred, obviously, because we're the attractive ones." Dave followed, letting John's yakking wash over him. There were a lot of times when he wondered why the hell he followed John around when it got him into more trouble than he could handle. But at the same time, what would he be doing? Probably sitting on his ratty couch playing hockey and getting his gamepad all sweaty. At least this could be considered cardio.

There was a rusted iron spiral staircase leading down into the basement. Dave had gone down there frequently with John and some of the guys from John's band. The place was half-flooded for most of the year, and in the winter it would freeze over and make for a great skating rink. They would use old boards as hockey sticks and a piece of brick as a puck.

To Dave's relief, there wasn't a body at the bottom of the stairs. Since it had been such a hot summer, most of the water had evaporated. The smell of damp and mildew was everywhere. Dave could feel it creeping into his clothes and crawling over his skin. Although the heat outside and above ground felt like walking around in a sweater made out of lava, Dave still preferred it to this. It wasn't so bad in winter when everything was frozen over, but the way the air was now made Dave wish he hadn't left his asthma inhaler in John's car. He could already feel his chest starting to tighten.

On the other hand, it could have been because of the huge bloodstain on the floor.

"Shit, that's a lot of blood," John commented, lighting a cigarette.

It was more than a lot of blood, Dave saw. It was about seven pints of blood; the human body held approximately eight to twelve. There was an entire _person_ worth of blood on that fucking floor, or close enough to make Dave feel really uncomfortable. John walked up to the stain and poked at the blood with his shoe. He nodded. "Yup, that's fresh. Do you have any gaps in your memory, David?"

"Are you saying I killed a hobo?" asked Dave.

"Are _you_ saying you killed a hobo?"

"What do you think?"

John tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette. Some of it landed in the blood. "I think you would have cleaned up, and that you can't be in two places in the same time," he said. "You can't even teleport, which sucks. I'd love to be in Bruges right now."

"Why Bruges?"

"It has a tower," said John. He looked around the room, probably looking for the body.

"That was a movie, John."

"It could _also_ be the tallest building I've ever pissed off of," said John.

"Is that an outdoor chess set?" asked Dave, pointing. It was standing on an upturned plastic crate behind John. There was a smear of blood leading from the crate, like something had been dragged through it. Probably whoever had been the previous owner of the blood. This wasn't a comforting thought, but then again, Dave didn't have very many comforting thoughts at this moment in time.

What he did have, however, was a baseball bat with a Bible taped to it. _Bible Belter,_ he thought. He was about to tell John that he'd thought of a better name for the bat and that he should probably use it to smash that chess set to pieces since it was better be safe than sorry, but then John picked up a white rook and said, "Hey, these are nearly as thick as my dick. This is no chess set! Shit, this is the biggest ruse since the Death Star."

" _Ruse?_ " echoed Dave. John twisted off the top of the rook piece and took a deep swig from it. "John, what are you doing?"

"Remember that summer when Head worked at the liquor store?" said John. Dave did, mostly because of the amount of times John had to get his stomach pumped at the hospital and that after he got fired, Head wasn't allowed to work in any of the liquor stores in the tri-state area. "They had one of those. Head would never let me have it. They made a limited edition of them in the sixties and he was only supposed to sell them to the right people. If you collected all of them, they made a chess set." John took another swig from the rook. Dave saw that it had _Old Crow_ written around the base, and wondered how playing chess with those would even work. Were you supposed to drink from every piece you took? He didn't think John knew how to play chess, but all the same, that wouldn't stop him.

"If you don't end up in hospital because you drank that, I'll put you there myself for dragging me here," said Dave. He paused. "You're standing next to a pool of blood, John," he pointed out.

"So?" John flicked his smoked cigarette on the ground and put it out with the toe of his sneaker. Dave expected John would say this. It wasn't that they were entirely unaffected by giant pools of blood, but the novelty and the fear factor did wear off after facing wig monsters, demonic maggot swarms and Fred fucking Durst.

"So where's the body?"

"I have no idea." John shrugged. "I'm reconstructing the crime scene." Apparently having decided that he was done with the rook, John set it down and took the bishop instead. All the pieces were roughly the same size, which Dave supposed was a good thing. But then again, they were all at least eleven, at most sixteen inches of old, possibly toxic bourbon.

"Who are you, Horatio Caine?"

John was opening his mouth to no doubt compare himself to a porn star or pro wrestler, and then the bishop grew teeth.

The rational part of Dave's brain didn't have time to process what was happening. The instinctive part of it immediately shifted to Protect John Mode. He hoisted the Bible Belter high and descended upon the chess piece.

"GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF!" John screamed, waving his arm to try and shake the bishop off. It had buried its tiny teeth into John's wrist and no matter how hard John tried, it wouldn't let go. Before the Bible Belter connected with the piece, Dave could have sworn he heard it growl.

He slammed the bat down with his full strength. The blow was powerful enough to knock the bishop off. It fell to the floor at John's feet and started rolling away, snarling as it went. Dave brought the bat down again. The chess piece burst into chunks of ceramic, the bourbon splashing out of it onto the floor.

"Well, this is new," said John. He was gingerly holding his forearm. Dave saw that the bishop had taken a chunk of John along with it when it fell. A flap of skin about the size of a quarter was missing from John's wrist, and he was bleeding quite heavily. "I guess we know what happened to the hobo." John nodded towards the bloodstain.

"You think he was eaten?"

"You think he _wasn't?_ Fuck, David, that thing was going to eat _me,_ " said John.

"Do you think it was maybe because you drank from it like a complete tool?" Dave snapped.

"It's fifty-year-old bourbon, of course I was going to drink from it."

"Maybe you aaagh JESUS CHRIST!" A sharp, griping pain shot through Dave's ankle. He stumbled forward, throwing his free hand out to try and grab something to hold himself upright. He caught John, who swore loudly and tried to grab him under the armpits.

Dave looked down. The rook's teeth were nibbling on his Achilles' tendon, casual as anything. The thing didn't even have a face; it was just a twelve-inch ceramic bottle in the shape of a castle. He didn't want to think about how come it had teeth; his top priority right now was getting the fucking thing the fuck off his fucking leg.

"KILL IT! IT'S EATING MY LEG, KILL IT!" he shouted. He tried to twist his body around so that he could hit the rook with the Bible Belter, but it was no good. Every time he tried to put weight on his leg, it would hurt so much that white spots swam in front of his eyes.

"GIVE ME THE FUCKING BAT, DAVID!" John demanded. He grabbed the Belter from Dave with both hands, wrenching it out of his grip. Dave overbalanced, landing on his hands and knees on the dirty, damp basement floor. The pain in his ankle continued to be excruciating, until there was a crunching sound, and then it burned like hell as the bourbon from the rook John had smashed went all over the bite on Dave's leg.

Everything after that was pants-wetting terror. 

The remaining fourteen pieces all became animate and jumped on him and John at the same time. Dave had no idea how it was that fucking bourbon bottle chess pieces could move with such speed and efficiency, but it probably had something to do with the tiny, furry centipede legs that they scuttled about on. Evolutionary theory wasn't one of Dave's strong points, so he didn't bother trying to figure out what kind of depraved creator had made these abominations. He was pretty good at hitting things, though, so he used his advantageous height and weight to grab a white knight that was scuttling towards him and whack it against a black pawn that was climbing up John's shin.

Dave had hoped they would smash on impact, but all his hit did was slightly discourage the pawn. It dug its teeth into John's jeans, trying to bite through the fabric. Dave hit it again –at this point, the knight in his hand was snarling – all the while trying to ignore the three pieces crawling over his back.

The ceramic cracked near the top of the bottle. As bourbon started leaking out, the pawn released its grip on John's jeans and slid to the floor. John kicked it away so hard that it hit the basement wall and smashed entirely. Dave flung the knight he was holding to join it.

Dave felt tiny teeth at the nape of his neck, and he grabbed the chess piece on his back so quickly he nearly dislocated his shoulder. He yanked it off, gritting his teeth against the pain. He was pretty sure he'd taken some skin along with it, but it didn't matter as long as the bastard was gone. 

"I've got the moves like Jäger!" John shouted, and Dave felt the remaining chess pieces knocked off his back by the Bible Belter. He scrambled to his feet, favouring his injured ankle. The stabbing pain went up to the back of his knee. He could feel his foot squelching with blood in his sneaker. 

They were surrounded. The moment John knocked one chess piece away with the Bible Belter, another would take its place. The fuckers were fast, ravenous, and they were _angry_. Probably because they hadn't counted on the fact that John and Dave would put up a fight, seeing as their main diet up to now had consisted of hobos too weak or drunk to fight back.

The chess pieces couldn't jump very high, which was a blessing, but they were great at finding leverage where there seemed to be none. The remaining bishop had climbed on one of the tanks for the flamethrower strapped to John's back, Dave noticed. It was evidently trying to get at the soft skin at the curve of John's neck, start somewhere that was juicy and exposed. Carnivorous son of a bitch. If only they hadn't left every single useful weapon, including the boom box, in the trunk of John's shitty Caddie, Dave thought with bitter resignation, noting this moment as yet another of the many savage disappointments in his life, which was probably about to become very short, very abruptly.

Dave was reaching to grab the bishop and remove it from the flamethrower on John's back, and then the fact that there was a Vietnam-era flamethrower strapped to John's back and that bourbon was highly flammable finally registered in his brain.

He grabbed John's shoulder and spun him around. He attempted to say something to the effect of _you're holding a fucking flamethrower, you shitbird,_ but all that came out was "JOHN! FLAMETHROWER! JOHN!" in a voice hoarse with terror and urgency.

John gaped at him, and then shook himself. He thrust the Bible Belter into Dave's hands. He grabbed the igniter, his finger slipping on the safety catch. He managed to release it on the third try, and then he squeezed the trigger. 

Dave jumped out of the way, stumbling on his injured foot. He grabbed the bishop from John's back and threw it into the line of fire. It exploded mid-flight with a shriek. The burning alcohol hit the ground and lit the large puddle from the other smashed chess pieces. A surge of hot air hit Dave's face as the fire spread around the basement, following the trail of spilled bourbon, slithering over the remaining chess pieces which toppled to the floor helplessly. Dave watched a white pawn roll around the floor. It vibrated with anger, and then its top twisted off and more bourbon was fed to the fire.

"For your own saké, you're _fired!_ " John shouted, laughing as the fire shot up.

Dave blinked, and then blinked again, trying to get the beads of sweat out of his eyelashes. He was able to make out the stairs through the sweat and the heat haze. All he could smell was the alcohol burning and his own sweat. Most of everything was on fire, and it seemed to Dave that John wasn't letting go of the trigger any time soon. Dave's blood was rushing in his ears and he could feel his chest tightening. He breathed in and pain tore through his chest. He was panicking. No shit, _everything was on fire._ His breathing was coming in raspy, wheezing gasps now. _Everything was on fire._ He was _not_ going to have a fucking asthma attack and die in a dilapidated hotel basement, surrounded by burning alcohol. Sure, he was a loser, but he wasn't that hopeless. His inhaler was in John's car, he had the Bible Belter in his hand, and there was a mostly clear path to the stairs, if he ran really quickly and ignored the burning chess pieces all around. 

John's flamethrower spat its last and died. The tanks were out of gas. John let go of the trigger, the corners of his mouth downturned with disappointment. Dave was really going to have to talk to him about pyromania at some point. For now, though, he was going to run.

Getting back to the Caddie from the basement was a blur. All that Dave registered was the sound of his sneakers slapping against the dusty floor and the sensation of trying not to vomit his lungs out. The last glimpse of the basement was all orange, yellow and black, the fire still burning merrily away. Dave hoped to hell that the entire place would burn down and bury that demonic chess set under a pile of bricks and mortar. 

He wrenched open the Caddie's door, pushing the cooler to the floor and collapsing into the back seat. The car shook as John threw himself into the passenger seat.

"You okay?" John asked from the front of the car. Dave felt like his chest was a size too small, like some masochistic bastard had him in a vice and wouldn't stop squeezing. He tried to take a breath so he could tell John that he was an asshole for leaving his inhaler in the glove box, but when he inhaled the oxygen stopped just before reaching his lungs.

"I'm… an asshole," said Dave, his throat tightening around his words. He tried breathing in some more, but when he took a deeper breath white spots swam across his vision like the fourth of fucking July.

John chuckled. "Yeah, but—you don't look so hot, Dave. And I don't just mean that you're fat and sweaty." The Bible Belter thunked to the floor. Dave moved his head and saw John sitting in the driver's seat. His head swam. John's feet were on the passenger seat, dirt and ash rubbing off on the fabric. Dave was so dizzy that it felt as if his head was going to roll right off his shoulders.

"I'm having... an asthma attack, you... shitbird," Dave spat, pain stabbing through his ribs at the last word. 

John scrambled to open the glove box. He grabbed Dave's inhaler and tossed it to him. It landed on Dave's chest like a ton of bricks. Head spinning, Dave stuck it into his mouth so quickly that the plastic clacked against his teeth. He pressed the canister once and wheezed in the medication. This was the bit he hated the most. He held his breath as his lungs tried to absorb the oxygen that wasn't there, and his chest felt like it was going to cave in, like his ribs were going to squeeze his useless, spongy lungs into mush, like wet bread in the rain. 

Dave exhaled slowly, heart thumping against his ribcage, his chest shaking with the rush of air. There was a weight on his sternum where the inhaler hit him when John threw it, like someone had parked an elephant on his chest. He started counting hippopotami, wondering if he'd have the self-control to get to sixty before he took another hit of medication from the inhaler. His lungs were a black hole, and all the oxygen in the universe wasn't enough to fill them. He stared at the ceiling of the Caddie, hoping that focusing on a faded brown stain was going to make the thousand billion points of light go away.

When he got to the twenty-seventh hippopotamus, he told it to go fuck itself and put the inhaler into his mouth again, pushing the canister down and taking another hit. Saying that it felt better this time would be a gross overstatement. The most he could say about it was that it no longer felt like his ribs were going to puncture his lungs, but the black hole was still very much there. He wished the Department of Health would get off its useless ass and get to inventing bionic lungs already, because the ones made out of tissue were a piece of shit as far as Dave was concerned. He turned his head just to check if he was still dizzy and saw John kneeling on the driver's seat, watching him. The seat appeared to lurch as another wave of dizziness overtook him, so Dave closed his eyes, trying to hold his breath.

The acrid smell of tobacco smoke made him open his eyes again. John had lit a cigarette. Dave must have looked murderous, because John blinked and said, "What? You stopped looking like you were going to die, so I thought it was okay." Dave narrowed his eyes. "Okay, okay, I'll hold it out the window! Jesus." John stuck out the hand that was holding the cigarette through the rolled down driver's window. His wrist was still bleeding, and Dave saw a drop of blood detach itself from John's skin, making a short and quick trip into the dirt outside the car.

You weren't supposed to take more than two doses of the inhaler in four hours, but the pharmaceutical company that made it probably didn't take into account the extenuating circumstances of being attacked by a cannibalistic chess set when they were writing the warnings, so Dave used it again, not bothering to count any hippopotami this time. He hadn't even noticed that he had tunnel vision until it started to recede and he realised that there was more to the ceiling than the faded brown stain he'd been looking at. 

Little by little, Dave's breathing steadied. His chest stopped shaking with every exhale, and his lungs no longer felt like an insatiable black hole. He took slow, deep breaths, concentrating on the oxygen going into his bloodstream. His heart was still racing, and his limbs felt heavy and sluggish, but at least the sensation that every breath was ripping his lungs open had stopped. 

"Feeling better?" asked John. The cigarette dangled from between his lips as he shrugged off the flamethrower. Dave nodded, regretting it immediately for the dizziness it caused. "You'd make a great superhero, David," commented John, flicking the ash off the end of his cigarette. "Asthma Boy! The only thing he can't catch is his breath!"

Dave laughed, which came as an unwelcome surprise to his respiratory system so it decided that he should be coughing instead. He rolled on his side, his hands on his mouth to try and hold the coughs in. "You're bleeding," he told John once they finally stopped.

"At least I'm not getting it all over the seats," said John. Dave looked down and saw that the blood from his injured ankle was soaking into the back seat. "There's a first aid kit in the glove box, hang on." He took one last drag from his cigarette and then tossed it out the window. From the glove box John produced the smallest first aid kit Dave had ever seen. He sat up, closing his eyes against the dizziness as John crawled into the back seat, almost elbowing Dave in the face. Grumpily, Dave sat up, kicking the Bible Belter under the driver's seat.

"I'll have to bleach that," complained John, pointing at the stain. He zipped the first aid kit open and unfolded it on his lap. 

"When did you start caring what your car looked like?" The backseat of John's last car had smelled of refried beans and vomit for an entire winter before John thought to get it cleaned. The stink had got so bad that John had to drive with all the windows rolled down or risk suffocation, which wasn't a problem for him until a big snowstorm hit Undisclosed sometime in early January. John had been driving home at night, and drove clean off the road and into the cornfield because the snow was gusting into the car and he couldn't see where he was going. Dave had confiscated his car keys until he'd agreed to have the car cleaned. "Shouldn't we be driving off?" added Dave. "What if those things learn how to navigate stairs while you're fucking around in Florence Nightingale cosplay?"

"I think they're too busy being on fire to do that," said John. "I ain't drivin' off with you menstruating all over my back seat." He fiddled with the first aid kit and took out a bandage and some gauze.

Dave gingerly took off his sneaker and peeled off his sock, wincing as the cotton sticky with blood got unstuck from the wound. "I'm thinking we need to establish some rules of living in Undisclosed," he said. "If we want to keep doing this and staying alive."

"Like what?" asked John. "Also, can I have a cigarette now without you givin' me the evil eye? I don't really feel like inhaling the fumes from your feet."

"You'd ruin the nice moment that my lungs are having with all this oxygen?"

"Hey, I saved your fat ass from a cannibalistic, bourbon chess set, and I couldn't even drink any of it. I deserve a cigarette."

There was no point arguing with John about how he'd been the one to provoke the fucking cannibalistic chess set in the first place, because John wouldn't understand the reasoning behind it. He didn't simply flirt with danger; he took it to dinner and a movie, made sweet love to it all night and then slammed the door in its face when it turned up on his doorstep with a paternity test nine months later. Or something, Dave wasn't very good at extended metaphors at the best of times, let alone when he'd lost a significant amount of blood and narrowly avoided getting torched.

"Rules, John," said Dave. "Rule number one: if there's a huge goddamn bloodstain on the floor, don't stand around like an asshole and poke at it. Rule number two, if there isn't an open and _fast_ fucking means of escape, you don't go in."

"You mean _we_ , yeah?"

"I mostly mean you, because you have shitty impulse control." Dave snatched the bandage and gauze from John's hands. "I'm taking that."

"You ain't touchin' me, I don't want to get your blood over me and get feline AIDS."

"John, you're the one wh—"

"Because you're a pussy."

"You're the one who's bleeding from your wrist, bullshit muncher," Dave grumbled. "And you're shaking." John was; he was almost imperceptibly vibrating in his seat, and now that he wasn't holding the bandage anymore Dave could see that his hands were trembling too.

"It's adrenaline," said John. "I'd be fine if you let me have that cigarette."

"You'd be even better if I'd let you drink the rest of that bourbon, right?" 

Dave almost regretted saying that for the look on John's face. But then again, no – he reminded himself that John was the guy who kept dragging him into unimaginable shit and near-death situations almost every time he stepped out of the house. This was supposed to be a fun, drunken afternoon of careless vandalism and setting shit nobody cared about on fire. Instead, Dave was injured, he'd had the most serious asthma attack in months, and it was so hot that beads of sweat were trickling down his calves. What was even more frustrating, he was so hopped up on adrenaline he couldn't fucking peel away the two little flaps that held the fucking gauze in its snug little antibacterial pocket because his hands were shaking and all of him was shaking and fuck, _fuck_ he hated it when his adrenaline rush hit too late for him to do anything but sit there and vibrate like a Rampant Rabbit until it went the fuck away.

He gave up and ripped the packet open with his teeth, spitting out the offending bit of plastic onto the floor. He grabbed John's wrist and pressed the bandage to the wound, letting it soak up the blood. 

"I was going to give you my Star Wars cups if I bled out and died here, but fuck that, Amy can have them," said John.

Dave wiped the skin around the wound. It was deeper than he thought – he could see the fat underneath. "Whatever, I wanted the waffle iron anyway," he said. "Got any antiseptic wipes in that first aid kit?"

John tossed a small packet to him with his free hand. It landed on Dave's lap. "No, they're burying the waffle iron with me, Dave. We talked about this," he said. They hadn't really, unless you counted John recording his last will and testament to the tune of _Black_ by Pearl Jam and putting it up on YouTube as talking about it, which Dave didn't. The video had about fifty views, and at least half of those were from John, who wanted the song played on his deathbed by a reunited _Three Arm Sally_ while he lip-synced along.

"Whatever," Dave said again, more forcefully. Although not getting the waffle iron after John's death was a definite blow, maybe it was for the best. If Dave had a cooking show, it would just be a montage of him sticking frozen things into his oven and hoping the useless fucking thing wouldn't turn his lasagne to volcanic rock on the outside and barely defrost it on the inside. John's cooking show would be much the same, except it would involve gratuitous male nudity, aprons with terrible jokes on them, and a waffle iron.

Dave managed to open the wipes with his fingers instead of his teeth. He took a moment to savour this small victory, and then cleaned John's wound with the wipe. To his credit, John didn't hiss or scowl at him or react in a similarly overdramatic way. His eyes just darted around absent-mindedly, one of his knees bouncing. Dave pressed another, clean bandage to the wound on John's wrist, and started to wrap the gauze tightly around it.

"Promise me you'll stick to the rules, John, because I'm not enjoying this at all," said Dave. The adrenaline almost made him believe that he was lying and that he was actually having the time of his life getting up to stupid shit and getting injured with, and because of, John. Almost.

"Did you come with an extra stick up your ass?" John said. "Or did you shove it up there yourself? _Some assembly required,_ right?"

"Fuck you," said Dave, pulling the gauze together and tying the ends off. 

"I wouldn't be surprised if you liked shoving stuff up your ass at all, since it fits your sexual profile," John went on. Choosing to say nothing this time, Dave rolled the window down and tossed the dirty antiseptic wipe and bandage on the ground outside the car. The heat of the day wafted over him, at first like a hairdryer blowing, and then like a steamroller. He could almost hear his sweat glands working overtime. "Meaning that you're gay," John said when it became clear to him that Dave wasn't going to bite. 

"I've got a girlfriend," Dave said, wondering if touching the can of beer left on the dashboard was worth the third degree burns he'd probably get from it, considering it had been left out in the sun for so long. The beer had probably gone flat, too.

John shrugged. "Yeah, well, George Clooney was married, wasn't he?"

"Everything leads to gay sex with you, one way or another," Dave said, checking that he'd tied the gauze tight enough. "Like rivers running into the sea."

"Only natural when I'm with you, David," John said seriously. 

"Sounds to me like you're way too worried if I like dicks," said Dave, as John tried to nudge him out of the way so he could squeeze into the driver's seat. "Is that why you talk about your supposedly enormous schlong so much, to hide the gay panic?"

John paused, one hand on the passenger seat, knee in the air, like a middle-distance runner frozen in the second after the starting pistol went off. He laughed. "No gay panic here," he said, sitting down next to Dave again. "Look, I'll prove it."

He gripped Dave's shoulder and shimmied closer to him, their knees bumping. Dave scrambled back until the window crank in the back door painfully hit the small of his back and the heel of his shoe bumped against the overturned cooler. John smelled like gasoline and smoke and blood, and Dave didn't even want to think about what _he_ smelled like. Probably the usual _Eau de Wong:_ sweat and Axe, the smell of teenage desperation that followed him into adulthood because he was too lazy to change his deodorant. 

Then John was kissing him, with tongue and everything, and the first thought Dave had was, _oh, this again._ But then, that couldn't be right at all, because John had never kissed him before. This was clearly the first time, since the sick feeling in his gut was entirely unfamiliar. It was an entirely new brand of guilt at least, the kissing-your-best-friend kind of guilt. But then again, it seemed like he remembered everything else: the cigarette smoke on John's tongue, John's other hand gripping Dave's face to keep him close, the way his three o'clock shadow scratched Dave's chin.

Blessed are the meek, for they have never experienced the soy sauce. Other people could have déjà vu and convince themselves that what they were remembering had never happened. Dave, on the other hand, was absolutely sure that it did, he just couldn't be sure in which universe. Maybe one where they'd both broken their promise to Big Jim and hadn't been able to save his little sister, and there were just the two of them, without Amy. Dave sure was glad he wasn't living in that universe. In the entire disappointing shitheap that was his life, Amy was the best thing to have happened to him, and he would sooner be sodomised by Korrok himself than fuck that up. It didn't take a sweaty, scratchy kiss from John for him to realise that, but it was another one of the many things that rammed it home.

John pulled away, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "That did it," he said. Dave licked his own lips, feeling slightly blindsided. "We really need to start buying better beer. That tasted even worse the second time around."

"I'm glad it was good for you too," said Dave. John grinned at him, and then squeezed past him and slid into the driver's seat. He handed Dave the flamethrower, and Dave carefully placed it on the floor next to him. He took the first aid kit to take care of his own wound, and scrambled into the front of the car, bumping his head on the ceiling as he did so. Dave sat heavily into the passenger seat, massaging his head.

"I'm having a cigarette now," John announced, already lighting it. Dave took the can of beer from the dashboard. It wasn't as hot to the touch as he feared, but when he tasted the beer, it was flat and so warm that it was like someone had pissed it out straight into the can. Disgusted, Dave lobbed it out of the passenger window in the direction of the abandoned hotel. A steady plume of grey smoke was oozing from one of the smashed windows on the first floor. 

"Bible Belter," he said as John stuck the keys in the ignition.

"What?"

"That would be a cool name for the bat with the Bible," said Dave.

John sucked on his cigarette thoughtfully. "Shit, it totally would," he said. "Deal. It's the Bible Belter." He turned the keys in the ignition, and the Caddie sputtered to life. Creedence Clearwater Revival strummed their guitars.

"George Clooney?" Dave asked as they pulled away from the abandoned hotel and got onto the road. "Really?"

"Yup," John said, stepping on the gas.

"Huh." 

They drove in silence as John Fogerty wailed.

"BURN AWAY THE GOODNESS  
YOU AND I REMAIN  
DID YOU SEE THE LAST WAR?  
WELL, HERE I AM AGAIN  
SINISTER PURPOSE…"

**Author's Note:**

> The bourbon chess set is [legit](http://www.megachess.com/Old_Crowe_Bourbon_Chess_Set_p/mxp03.htm), and John Cheese's last will and testament to the tune of Pearl Jam's _Black_ is [incredibly real](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYkG8Um8Vho). Thanks to [callmejude](http://archiveofourown.org/users/callmejude) and [darklylacquered](https://twitter.com/darklylacquered) for looking this over and all the encouragement.


End file.
